On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Brian Modra
<brian@zwartberg.com> wrote:
2009/10/15 Bob Pawley <rjpawley@shaw.ca>:
> Hi
>
> While looking at an error message for iexplore.exe, I noticed, on Task
> Manager, that there are 5 or more instances of postgres.exe running. Each
> instance is consuming between 7 to 10 megs of resources, for a total of
> almost 50 megs.
It's not actually using up that much memory. Windows (and linux for that matter) think Postgres is using up that much per process, but in actuality, most of that is shared memory between them. So if you have 5 @ 10 MB a piece, you may only have 12 - 20 MB in use.
>
> Is this normal behavour?
yes
+1
> If so, could someone enlighten me as to the purpose?
Every time you connect to postgres, your connection gets a new postgres.exe (plus there are a few system ones). So 5 connections = 5 postgres.exe + a few (3 or 4) system processes. It's normal, it allows the OS to schedule who does what work. If you have multiple processors, you get nice parallelism without postgres having to be threaded internally.
--Scott